Actors are supposed to bask in glory when it comes, but right now John Hawkes seems to be grimacing through it. Partly that's because exposure is the last thing the Texan actor was seeking, partly it's because his latest role has also taken its toll on his body. He's just got back from this year's Sundance Film Festival, where his movie, The Surrogate, received awards, standing ovations and the biggest sale ($6m). Playing a polio-stricken poet in search of sexual experience, Hawkes had to spend most of the movie lying in bed. "His spine is horrifically curved and he can only movie his head 90 degrees," he explains. "So it was my idea to make a soccer ball-sized piece of foam so that would lay under my left side to curve my spine. And it was uncomfortable. Health professionals have told me my organs have shifted inside from laying on it too long. We're still figuring that out. Who knows if my back is screwed up because of that movie or because of life?"

You could say Hawkes's life experience is written all over his face. Kings of Sundance and other such dubious titles traditionally go to handsome young bucks fresh out of acting school. Hawkes looks fresh out of prison: a gangly, grizzled 52-year-old cross between Sean Penn and a Doonesbury character. But this is the third year running that the festival's most buzzed-about indie movie has featured Hawkes. Two years ago it was Winter's Bone, which earned Hawkes an Oscar nomination, playing Jennifer Lawrence's morally dubious meth-manufacturing uncle, Teardrop. Last year, it was Martha Marcy May Marlene, finally released here in the UK last week.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is almost a companion piece to Winter's Bone. Both focus on young women (this time it's Elizabeth Olsen) and both find strange, menacing aspects to rural America. And again, Hawkes is the primary agent of that strangeness and menace. This time he's Patrick, the calm, charismatic leader of a cult-like community in upstate New York, into which Olsen's susceptible young drifter is seduced. One moment Hawkes is strumming love songs to her; the next … well, let's say he'd be a good advert for the locking up of daughters. But Patrick is the reverse of Hawkes's character in Winter's Bone, who started out scary but revealed a nobler side.

"If you're telling a story it's always best not to play the ending," he says. "So with Teardrop, the challenge was to make the audience worry for her [Jennifer Lawrence] every time she's around him. He doesn't molest her or get her killed, but it should seem as that is going to happen. And Patrick, because he ends up being a monster, I tried to make him as normal as I could at the outset."

In this context, it's usually Charles Manson that springs to mind, but Hawkes's portrayal is all the creepier for its complete lack of apocalyptic Messianic raving. "It seems like every year Hollywood makes an attempt to retell the Manson story," he says, "and I just couldn't be less interested in it. It's not really our crowning achievement as a civilisation. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it just bores me. One thing I loved was that the word 'cult' wasn't even in this script. I would jokingly admonish anyone who said it on set: 'It's a community!'"

'It was funny leaving Austin, where I'd been viewed as fairly normal. As soon as I got out to LA, for some reason, it was like: psycho!'

John Hawkes in The Surrogate

Was Hawkes himself brought up in some alternative "community"? The characters he plays and his relaxed career trajectory suggest he hasn't followed the usual route through life. He initially denies there was anything bohemian about his upbringing: "Pastoral, small town,, very much a midwest Scandinavian community … not a lot of hippies, if that's what you're inferring." In his late teens, though, he moved to Austin, Texas – a notorious oasis of counterculture oddness. He spent just enough time in "the straight world", as he puts it, to sustain activities in music (he was in punk band Meat Joy), plus theatre, writing, and graphic design; you name it. He was even roped into some modern dance. "I don't really see such a delineation between any of it. I maintain that if you're a novelist and you go into an art museum, you'll come out a better novelist. And if you paint a picture for an hour you're a better actor at the end of it."

It was only after hitching from state to state for a year playing in bands that he got round to seriously pursuing acting in Los Angeles. There, his identity wasn't so fluid: "It was funny leaving Austin, where I'd been viewed as fairly normal. As soon as I got out here, for some reason, it was like: psycho! I don't know what that says about Texas but I played a lot of crazy people when I got to town: psychos, nerds, psycho-nerds. I did whatever I crappy TV show I could to avoid straight work. There's a lot of skeletons in my closet!"

The work gradually got better. Small-screen aficionados will recognise him as Sol Star from Deadwood, or Danny McBride's brother Dustin in Eastbound & Down. And now that you know the face you'll keep on seeing it, in everything from From Dusk Till Dawn to The Perfect Storm to Me And You And Everyone We Know to last year's Steven Soderbergh epidemic thriller Contagion.

"I was fine with my career where it was," he says. "But this is kind of … interesting." Apart from the back pain, the other drawback to his new-found celebrity is the prospect of overexposure. "There are some wonderful actors in this country, truly, that I have a hard time believing playing a character because I just know too much about them. It's important to try to maintain some kind of mystery about myself. I'm not interested in being a household name. One of my strengths is that people don't know who I am."

John Hawkes in Martha Marcy May Marlene. Photograph: Drew Innis

Good luck with that. The Surrogate took two awards at Sundance and his performance is already being discussed as an Oscar contender next year. Then there's his role in Spielberg's Lincoln biopic to look forward to. And if that wan't enough, he's also found time to work on a solo album – but only because his band have stopped playing together, he maintains. He's still an accomplished singer and guitarist. He did a song on the Winter's Bone soundtrack, and we get a fine eerie ballad from him in Martha Marcy May Marlene. "That was an existing song, by Jackson C Frank, but if you listen, I added sort of a bassline that sounds a little Joy Division, and the singing style might have some Vic Chesnutt in it."

Given the choice between fame and freedom, you suspect he'd take the latter any time – as long as it keeps him out the straight world. "I just love to create, as cliched as that sounds," he says. "If there was some sort of apocalyptic moment in the world and I was still alive, I'd probably be in a burned-out basement banging rocks together and making up a poem about the day."